On The Resonance , Saint Precious Sings For Her Trans Siblings

Khloe Lubo

For Saint Precious, her debut EP The Resonance isn’t just a professional milestone, but a sort of personal arrival. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian community, the Swedish-Barbadian artist began her musical journey singing in the church choir. The atmosphere was far from affirming. “Growing up I was told that LGBTQIA+people were comparable to murderers, thieves, et cetera,” she tells me soberly via Zoom from her Berlin flat. “I have never really had firm grounding in relation to finding myself. All of that has happened outside of the walls that I should be able to call home.”

At age 17, the same year she left her family’s home, she made her first attempt to record her own music, which didn’t quite work out. Working with Swedish producer Adam Taal, the young musician felt stifled because she was still grappling with her own nascent queer identity. “At that point I knew I was trans, but didn’t know that I was a trans woman yet,” she explains. Creatively, she felt scattered, unsure of what to say or how to say it. It wasn’t until three years later, when Precious began her transition and she met Stockholm-based producer Cristian Dinamarca, that something unlocked. The pair quickly found kindred spirits in each other, sparking a friendship and musical bond that ultimately birthed The Resonance, out today on Dinamarca’s own Staycore label. “When we got into the studio, everything just clicked and it happened so fast,” Precious says. “I’ve been bound to his music since we met in 2015. It was so natural.” She describes the sound they arrived at together as “disturbance within solitude,” a meld of soft reggaeton-influenced electronica with her exquisitely powerful vocals.

For Precious, Dinamarca provided a safe space where someone early in transition could make a first creative foray. “I think that it was his way of already being around queer spheres, being older than me, [and] having so much experience of how to be around trans women [that] made me comfortable,” she elaborates. “If I was super hormonal one day in the studio and I didn’t feel like I could do anything, then it was a five-minute session and that was fine.” This attention, care and love can be felt in a track like “Ode to T,” which Precious proudly labels “a trans woman anthem,” adding with a smile, “It’s for the dolls, period.”

The song, an ethereal R&B track with lyrics about gender transition, was inspired by filmmaker Adinah Dancyger’s video of Mykki Blanco reciting the 1992 Zoe Leonard poem “I want a president.” When Precious saw it for the first time, she felt a “totally unapologetic, totally effortless, pure strength.” In a similar vein, she wanted “Ode to T” to feel like a “warm hug” for her trans siblings, providing a sonic space of safety. The lyrics describe her skin getting softer and her mind becoming stronger as she sheds fragments of her past. In the chorus, she sings about feminine energy flowing through her blood, inviting the listener into her world, “Wanna see my future? Well come on, love,” she sings, later issuing a rallying cry: “Come on all my trans girls […] / sing from the bottom of your lungs / for all of us and the ones who can’t or won’t.” The artist wants trans listeners to know that they are not alone, and that they are sacred. “Fundamentally, it is about liberation,” she says.

Khloe Lubo

Those themes of resilience, freedom, and euphoria run throughout The Resonance. On “Sanctum,” Precious sings of feeling seen and loved in a way she could have hoped for or imagined. A self-proclaimed hopeless romantic, the track was inspired by a picnic date she went on with an ex that left her with a feeling of elation. She had just started taking hormones, and felt insecure at the time, “but I knew damn well who I was,” she maintains. Most of the relationship was confined to her apartment due to her boyfriend’s fears of how, as she puts it, “he would be perceived being with a girl like me.” But one day, the boyfriend realized he wanted to take their relationship public, meet Precious’ friends, and take her on an idyllic “Disney fantasy” date. As she sat with her lover on a white picnic blanket covered in roses, Precious says she was “totally without dysphoria,” adding with a cheeky smile, “It was like I had taken a tranny Xanax.” The sultry song is fleeting and ephemeral, reflecting the effervescence of the moment that inspired it. “Being out in the dating sphere as a trans woman you have shortness of breath all the time,” she says, “You never know if you’re going to go away from a guy without being slapped or screamed at for any goddamn reason.”

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The Resonance is also a deeply spiritual work — a manifestation of Precious’ own revelations about the existence of God in her life. “This EP is also not just bound to gender,” she notes, “It’s about balance and is about past, present, future and how they all weave together.” Though she grew up in a fundamentalist sect, she did not arrive at her own conception of a higher power until she experimented with psychedelics after leaving home. “I realized how I am connected to everything around me. I’m everything and nothing,” she says of the experience, “That also made me realize that I believe God is everything.” That belief is threaded throughout the EP. On “Catharsis,” an energetic rave-influenced track, Precious sings, “Everything is the only thing that we deserve,” which is not only a self-empowering message, but a rebuttal to the narrow-mindedness of those who wish harm on the queer community.

Though Precious has come a long way from the closeted teen she used to be, she doesn’t see the EP as the definitive statement on who she is. Rather, she conceives of the record as a capsule for a pivotal time in her journey of self-knowledge and exploration, a mirror that has been shattered and then mended. “I think that [trans people] are the embodiment of putting together that broken mirror.” As our conversation comes to a close, I can’t help but thank her for being so vulnerable and thoughtful, but she is quick to reflect her glow back on me. “At the end of the day, I’m the universe,” she tells me tenderly. “And you are also the universe. Period.”

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Originally Appeared on them.